Plastic bag ban widened in Mendocino County

Plastic bag bans adopted last year by the county of Mendocino and city of Ukiah extend to general merchandise stores and small groceries today.

The shift means merchants at almost all stores in Ukiah and the unincorporated areas of Mendocino County can no longer offer plastic bags to customers, or they could face fines of up to $500 per violation and could be sued by the city or county, which adopted ordinances banning plastic bags last year.

The ordinances became effective for large grocery stores in November 2012, and today becomes effective for smaller grocers and general merchandise stores.

For many downtown merchants who already supply paper bags, the change means they must charge at least 10 cents for them.

"A lot of people just don't want bags," said McNab's Men's Wear co-owner Bill McNab of his customers, but added, "When it rains that might change. Not a lot of people bring their own bags."

McNab's gave away the paper bags until today, when the store was required to start charging for them, he said.

Labels, a women's consignment shop on South State Street, won't be affected by the change, according to owner Stephanie Gregg. The shop offers store credit to customers who bring in used paper shopping bags from department stores for Labels to recycle by offering them to its customers. The recycled bags do not have a mandated charge, she says.

The 10-cent charge is intended, in part, to make proprietors whole for the cost of the bags, but McNab says that's only the case for the small and medium bags. He and his brother, the store's third generation of owners since it opened in 1940, decided to charge 25 cents for the largest size, which he said doesn't quite cover the cost. The large bags cost about 39 cents apiece to provide to customers, he said.

But the bigger picture is making consumers aware of the environmental damage the plastic bags cause, and to encourage them to bring their own reusable bags on any shopping trip, according to Mendocino Solid Waste Management Authority General Manager Mike Sweeney.

"Unless the store is required to recover its cost of the paper bag, the incentive for the reusable bags is missing," Sweeney wrote in a Monday statement. "Then folks who bring their own bags would be forced to subsidize the free bags for those who don't, since the cost of paper bags is incorporated into the price of goods purchased."

He said there are two reasons for the plastic bag bans, including to prevent them from becoming "roadside litter that harms wildlife and degrades the environment" on land and at sea, and to decrease the number of plastic bags "jamming the sort lines at our recycling facilities."

The ban was extended to small groceries and general merchandise stores in Fort Bragg last month. The city of Willits has not adopted a similar ban.

Sweeney wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Journal, "The only exception in the entire retail sector to the plastic carryout bag ban is restaurants, which were deleted from the ordinances because of a legal challenge from the plastic bag industry, which claimed that the state restaurant code preempted any local regulation of restaurant bags. This legal challenge was rejected recently by the State Appellate Court, so both Ukiah and the county will be considering amendments to their ordinances to include restaurant takeout bags."

Tiffany Revelle can be reached at udjtr@ukiahdj.com, on Twitter @TiffanyRevelle or at 468-3523.